4 The Broken Rosary The Heart of the Matter There is one episode in The Power and the Glory which I consider a precursor of The Heart of the Matter. The whisky-priest meets an Indian woman with her dead child. The woman refuses to let him bury the child. 'It occurred to him that she wanted her child buried near a church or perhaps only taken to an altar, so that he might be touched by the feet of a Christ' (The Power and the Glory, p. 206). The woman follows the priest across the barren mountains, carrying her dead child, until they reach a grove of crosses, where she lays down the body. 'Did she expect a miracle? And if she did, why should it not be granted her? the priest wondered. Faith, one was told, could move mountains, and here was faith - faith in the spittle that healed the blind man and the voice that raised the dead . . . . The priest found himself watching the child for some movement. When none came, it was as if God had missed an opportunity' (p. 209). It is this miracle which does not occur, this sense of disappointment, which hovers above the entire scene in The Heart of the Matter. In both novels, that feeling grows out of the unrelieved suffering of children, when God, the Divine Father, seems to have failed them. It is then that Greene's hero- the whisky-priest in The Power and the Glory and Scobie in The Heart of the Matter- has to shoulder a doubled burdenofpityand responsibility. This feeling of isolation in the task of fatherhood is expressed only once in The Power and the Glory. The whisky-priest is almost constantly aware of a Divine Being to which he is committed, and it is only over the grave of the Indian child that he feels a momentary wavering of his conviction. In The Heart of the Matter, however, the protagonist's awareness of his own orphanhood dominates the entire action and becomes the theme of the novel. This particular climate of the novel, this sense of disappointment, has been overlooked in two categories of critical discussion: the 'secular' and the 'orthodox- religious'. By the term 'secular' criticism, I refer to the discussions which dismiss the spiritual dimension of the action in the novel as a rationalisation or a form of neurosis. By the term 'orthodox-religious' 43 D. Erdinast-Vulcan, Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers © Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan 1988